We’re Exploited, Not Unqualified

Three months ago, a colleague wrote to me and suggested that the real travest in academe today was not merely the exploitation of adjuncts on a mass scale, but that students were getting ripped off because of the increased use of adjuncts to teach all manner of basic undergraduate courses.

Students and their parents, he argued, were paying exorbitant tuition costs to universities to cover the salaries of expensive Nobel Prize winners and other star scholars, thinking that these very scholars would be the ones teaching most of the courses. What students find out when they show up on campus, however, is that these stars don’t teach very much at all, and when they do, they certainly don’t teach freshmen or even that many undergraduates. Instead, he said, courses are taught by adjuncts and teaching assistants who are professionally underdeveloped and scholarly weak. Students and parents should rise up, he said, and protest this educational fraud and demand that professorial positions be held only by those truly qualified for them.

I would have brushed off these comments as idiotic and rude if not for the fact that I’ve heard and read echoes of this sentiment several times in the last year from others in academe. So, I offer a suggestion to adjuncts regarding this so-called travesty: Don’t buy a word of it.

Yes, it is true that universities sell themselves to prospective students and their parents by emphasizing the star researchers and scholars on their payrolls. And it is true that often these stars don’t come within shouting distance of a classroom for months on end. And, yes, the universities are practicing a deception of some form in not being forthcoming about this in their recruitment materials. And, finally, yes, something should be done about it.

But, to jump from these facts to the assertion that students are getting a dismal education because adjuncts teach up to half the classes today is a huge leap. Making this leap doesn’t take into account the changes that have taken place in the adjunct corps, nor does it distinguish between faculty members and graduate students.

Graduate students and adjuncts are increasingly lumped together, mostly because of collective bargaining and unionization efforts. Graduate-student teaching assistants and adjuncts have joined ranks in many states and at many institutions as a way to increase their numbers in the struggle for better salaries and benefits. Successful collective bargaining requires, well, a collective -- the bigger the better. So, joining these two sectors of the academic work force has produced results, but it has also blurred the real and important distinctions between the two.

Adjuncts are responsible for teaching and creating entire courses. Some teaching assistants have that opportunity, but most work for a full-time faculty member who designs the course and delivers the lectures, while the teaching assistants handle the discussions sessions and other duties. Adjuncts have to go through application procedures and interviews to land a teaching gig. Most T.A.'s, however, are slotted into whatever work that the department needs done that the students are qualified to handle.

Teaching assistants are learning as they work -- how to be good teachers, how to lecture and lead discussions, how to write fair tests, how to give decent assignments, how to deal with students who are confused or upset, and so on. The TA job does not require experience or a certain skill set. Instead, it is designed to provide experience and a certain skill set.

Now before you rush off to write me hate mail, let me just say that I worked my fanny off as a TA in both my master’s- and doctoral-degree programs. I know what you have to put up with, and I’m not suggesting that you don’t deserve better pay and working conditions, so don’t write to me about that.

All I’m saying is that adjuncts and teaching assistants are different animals. Most of today’s adjuncts -- especially those teaching in applied programs like business and technology -- have years of experience both inside and out of academe, and they bring all that experience into the class with them. Indeed, that is why they are hired in many instances. Moreover, the adjunct ranks are full of Ph.D.'s looking for their first tenure-track job. So even those adjuncts who don’t bring years of experience to their teaching have at least completed their graduate degrees, unlike most teaching assistants. Finally, many adjuncts, like me, are veteran teachers and scholars who’ve been in this business for years, and we’ve got the CV’s to prove it.

To say that education is compromised by the overuse of teaching assistants is one thing. That may or may not be true. But even if it is, that still says nothing about the use of adjuncts.

Many people who disparage the qualifications of adjuncts are operating under an assumption that may or may not have been true years ago, but certainly is not true today. The assumption was that the only people in academe who ended up as adjuncts were those who weren’t good enough to land full-time jobs. You didn’t publish enough, or what you published wasn’t any good, or you weren’t a good teacher, or whatever, so you ended up as one of academe’s bottom feeders, teaching basic courses to entry-level students whom you would have no trouble staying ahead of in class.

That’s not the case today. The economic realities of the marketplace have dramatically changed, so that the modern university’s bottom line doesn’t really survive without adjuncts. Full-time positions have been liquidated in favor of temporary ones because the latter are cheaper. Many, if not most, adjuncts today have scholarly qualifications that are the equivalent of those who landed full-time, tenure-track jobs two decades ago. It’s just that their timing was better. If some of us don’t have as many published articles or books as our full-time colleagues, it’s because we teach three times as many coursees and receive no research support of any kind from our institutions.

Economic shifts as well as the proliferation of graduate programs churning out Ph.D.'s without regard for market and work-force realities have created the adjunct nation we have today. There’s no excuse anymore for being oblivious to these facts.

Sure, some adjuncts are weak teachers, bad writers, and ineffective advisers, but so are some full-time faculty members. And unlike our tenured colleagues, we adjuncts have a hard cash incentive to perform well, at least in the classroom, because if we don’t, we get fired at the end of the term.

If higher education is suffering in quality in this country, it’s not because of the poor quality of service provided by the increasing numbers of adjuncts. That’s one burden we’re not willing to bear.